The House of Mirth
not now,” she gently admonished him; and then, in all the sweetness
of her recovered composure: “Since I must find shelter somewhere,
and since you’re so kindly here to help me——”
He gathered himself up at the challenge. “You will do as I tell
you? There’s but one thing, then; you must go straight to your
cousins, the Stepneys.”
“Oh—” broke from her with a movement of instinctive resistance;
but he insisted: “Come—it’s late, and you must appear to have gone
there directly.”
He had drawn her hand into his arm, but she held him back with a
last gesture of protest. “I can’t—I can’t—not that—you don’t know
Gwen: you mustn’t ask me!”
“I MUST ask you—you must obey me,” he persisted, though infected at
heart by her own fear.
Her voice sank to a whisper: “And if she refuses?”—but, “Oh, trust
me—trust me!” he could only insist in return; and yielding to his
touch, she let him lead her back in silence to the edge of the
square.
In the cab they continued to remain silent through the brief drive
which carried them to the illuminated portals of the Stepneys’
hotel. Here he left her outside, in the darkness of the raised
hood, while his name was sent up to Stepney, and he paced the showy
hall, awaiting the latter’s descent. Ten minutes later the two
men passed out together between the gold-laced custodians of the
threshold; but in the vestibule Stepney drew up with a last flare
of reluctance.
“It’s understood, then?” he stipulated nervously, with his hand on
Selden’s arm. “She leaves tomorrow by the early train—and my wife’s
asleep, and can’t be disturbed.”
Chapter 4
The blinds of Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room were drawn down against
the oppressive June sun, and in the sultry twilight the faces of
her assembled relatives took on a fitting shadow of bereavement.
They were all there: Van Alstynes, Stepneys and Melsons—even a
stray Peniston or two, indicating, by a greater latitude in dress
and manner, the fact of remoter relationship and more settled
hopes. The Peniston side was, in fact, secure in the knowledge that
the bulk of Mr. Peniston’s property “went back”; while the direct
connection hung suspended on the disposal of his widow’s private
fortune and on the uncertainty of its extent. Jack Stepney, in
his new character as the richest nephew, tacitly took the lead,
emphasizing his importance by the deeper gloss of his mourning
and the subdued authority of his manner; while his wife’s bored
attitude and frivolous gown proclaimed the heiress’s disregard of
the insignificant interests at stake. Old Ned Van Alstyne, seated
next to her in a coat that made affliction dapper, twirled his
white moustache to conceal the eager twitch of his lips; and Grace
Stepney, red-nosed and smelling of crape, whispered emotionally to
Mrs. Herbert Melson: “I couldn’t BEAR to see the Niagara anywhere
else!”
A rustle of weeds and quick turning of heads hailed the opening
of the door, and Lily Bart appeared, tall and noble in her black
dress, with Gerty Farish at her side. The women’s faces, as
she paused interrogatively on the threshold, were a study in
hesitation. One or two made faint motions of recognition, which
might have been subdued either by the solemnity of the scene, or by
the doubt as to how far the others meant to go; Mrs. Jack Stepney
gave a careless nod, and Grace Stepney, with a sepulchral gesture,
indicated a seat at her side. But Lily, ignoring the invitation, as
well as Jack Stepney’s official attempt to direct her, moved across
the room with her smooth free gait, and seated herself in a chair
which seemed to have been purposely placed apart from the others.
It was the first time that she had faced her family since her
return from Europe, two weeks earlier; but if she perceived any
uncertainty in their welcome, it served only to add a tinge of
irony to the usual composure of her bearing. The shock of dismay
with which, on the dock, she had heard from Gerty Farish of Mrs.
Peniston’s sudden death, had been mitigated, almost at once, by
the irrepressible thought that now, at last, she would be able to
pay her debts. She had looked forward with considerable uneasiness
to her first encounter with her aunt. Mrs. Peniston had vehemently
opposed her niece’s departure with the Dorsets, and had marked
her continued disapproval by not writing during Lily’s absence.
The certainty that she had heard of the rupture with the Dorsets
made the prospect of the meeting more formidable; and how should
Lily have repressed a quick sense of relief at the thought that,
instead of undergoing the anticipated ordeal, she had only to
enter gracefully on a long-assured inheritance? It had been, in
the consecrated phrase, “always understood” that Mrs. Peniston was
to provide handsomely for her niece; and in the latter’s mind the
understanding had long since crystallized into fact.
“She gets everything, of course—I don’t see what we’re here for,”
Mrs. Jack Stepney remarked with careless loudness to Ned Van
Alstyne; and the latter’s deprecating murmur—“Julia was always
a just woman”—might have been interpreted as signifying either
acquiescence or doubt.
“Well, it’s only about four hundred thousand,” Mrs. Stepney
rejoined with a yawn; and Grace Stepney, in the silence produced by
the lawyer’s preliminary cough, was heard to sob out: “They won’t
find a towel missing—I went over them with her the very day——”
Lily, oppressed by the close atmosphere, and the stifling odour
of fresh mourning, felt her attention straying as Mrs. Peniston’s
lawyer, solemnly erect behind the Buhl table at the end of the
room, began to rattle through the preamble of the will.
“It’s like being in church,” she reflected, wondering vaguely where
Gwen Stepney had got such an awful hat. Then she noticed how stout
Jack had grown—he would soon be almost as plethoric as Herbert
Melson, who sat a few feet off, breathing puffily as he leaned his
black-gloved hands on his stick.
“I wonder why rich people always grow fat—I suppose it’s because
there’s nothing to worry them. If I inherit, I shall have to be
careful of my figure,” she mused, while the lawyer droned on
through a labyrinth of legacies. The servants came first, then
a few charitable institutions, then several remoter Melsons and
Stepneys, who stirred consciously as their names rang out, and then
subsided into a state of impassiveness befitting the solemnity of
the occasion. Ned Van Alstyne, Jack Stepney, and a cousin or two
followed, each coupled with the mention of a few thousands: Lily
wondered that Grace Stepney was not among them. Then she heard her
own name—“to my niece Lily Bart ten thousand dollars—” and after
that the lawyer again lost himself in a coil of unintelligible
periods, from which the concluding phrase flashed out with
startling distinctness: “and the residue of my estate to my dear
cousin and name-sake, Grace Julia Stepney.”
There was a subdued gasp of surprise, a rapid turning of heads, and
a surging of sable figures toward the corner in which Miss Stepney
wailed out her sense of unworthiness through the crumpled ball of a
black-edged handkerchief.
Lily stood apart from the general movement, feeling herself for the
first time utterly alone. No one looked at her, no one seemed aware
of her presence; she was probing the very depths of insignificance.
And under her sense of the collective indifference came the acuter
pang of hopes deceived. Disinherited—she had been disinherited—and
for Grace Stepney! She met Gerty’s lamentable eyes, fixed on her
in a despairing effort at consolation, and the look brought her to
herself. There was something to be done before she left the house:
to be done with all the nobility she knew how to put into such
gestures. She advanced to the group about Miss Stepney, and holding
out her hand said simply: “Dear Grace, I am so glad.”
The other ladies had fallen back at her approach, and a space
created itself about her. It widened as she turned to go, and no
one advanced to fill it up. She paused a moment, glancing about
her, calmly taking the measure of her situation. She heard some one
ask a question about the date of the will; she caught a fragment
of the lawyer’s answer—something about a sudden summons, and an
“earlier instrument.” Then the tide of dispersal began to drift
past her; Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Herbert Melson stood on the
doorstep awaiting their motor; a sympathizing group escorted Grace
Stepney to the cab it was felt to be fitting she should take,
though she lived but a street or two away; and Miss Bart and Gerty
found themselves almost alone in the purple drawing-room, which
more than ever, in its stuffy dimness, resembled a well-kept family
vault, in which the last corpse had just been decently deposited.
* * * * *
In Gerty Farish’s sitting-room, whither a hansom had carried the
two friends, Lily dropped into a chair with a faint sound of
laughter: it struck her as a humorous coincidence that her aunt’s
legacy should so nearly represent the amount of her debt to Trenor.
The need of discharging that debt had reasserted itself with
increased urgency since her return to America, and she spoke her
first thought in saying to the anxiously hovering Gerty: “I wonder
when the legacies will be paid.”
But Miss Farish could not pause over the legacies; she broke into
a larger indignation. “Oh, Lily, it’s unjust; it’s cruel—Grace
Stepney must FEEL she has no right to all that money!”
“Any one who knew how to please Aunt Julia has a right to her
money,” Miss Bart rejoined philosophically.
“But she was devoted to you—she led every one to think—” Gerty
checked herself in evident embarrassment, and Miss Bart turned to
her with a direct look. “Gerty, be honest: this will was made only
six weeks ago. She had heard of my break with the Dorsets?”
“Every one heard, of course, that there had been some
disagreement—some misunderstanding——”
“Did she hear that Bertha turned me off the yacht?”
“Lily!”
“That was what happened, you know. She said I was trying to marry
George Dorset. She did it to make him think she was jealous. Isn’t
that what she told Gwen Stepney?”
“I don’t know—I don’t listen to such horrors.”
“I MUST listen to them—I must know where I stand.” She paused, and
again sounded a faint note of derision. “Did you notice the women?
They were afraid to snub me while they thought I was going to get
the money—afterward they scuttled off as if I had the plague.”
Gerty remained silent, and she continued: “I stayed on to see
what would happen. They took their cue from Gwen Stepney and Lulu
Melson—I saw them watching to see what Gwen would do.—Gerty, I must
know just what is being said of me.”
“I tell you I don’t listen——”
“One hears such things without listening.” She rose and laid her
resolute hands on Miss Farish’s shoulders. “Gerty, are people going
to cut me?”
“Your FRIENDS, Lily—how can you think it?”
“Who are one’s friends at such a time? Who, but you, you poor
trustful darling? And heaven knows what YOU suspect me of!” She
kissed Gerty with a whimsical murmur. “You’d never let it make any
difference—but then you’re fond of criminals, Gerty! How about the
irreclaimable ones, though? For I’m absolutely impenitent, you
know.”
She drew herself up to the full height of her slender majesty,
towering like some dark angel of defiance above the troubled Gerty,
who could only falter out: “Lily, Lily—how can you laugh about such
things?”
“So as not to weep, perhaps. But no—I’m not of the tearful order. I
discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge
has helped me through several painful episodes.” She took a
restless turn about the room, and then, reseating herself, lifted
the bright mockery of her eyes to Gerty’s anxious countenance.